SEO is a critical part of any digital marketing campaign. Even though it has been around for decades and is an essential building block of any digital business, it still leaves a lot of people confused. This is partly because there is often conflicting information available about a certain aspect of SEO, or people simply don’t know how to meet the needs of their clients. While SEO helps all kinds of businesses, there are minor differences in the specific approach you take to address your specific audience.
Even within the same industry, no two businesses are exactly alike. While using generic SEO strategies will definitely help, it might not generate the kind of ROI you were expecting. Depending on how sophisticated your SEO plan is, the process of SEO could cost you no money at all, or it could cost you thousands of dollars per month. People who are just starting out will want to get the most bang for their buck, and once they are comfortable with the kind of returns their efforts are generating, they will be more willing to invest in more advanced processes.
As a real estate agent, your website can generate a lot of business for you and get clients that you would not be able to serve in a brick-and-mortar setup. There are countless real estate businesses that operate solely online and are making excellent profits. Zillow is a great example of a highly successful digital real estate company. If you want to compete in the digital landscape, here are a few tips that are going to help you maximize your SEO strategy.
User Platforms
The first thing that you need to understand is that user behavior on the internet is changing. Today, more people are spending more time on the internet, but it is very different from what it was just a few years ago. In the past, people mostly came online for some kind of work-related activity. Today, a lot of people still use the internet for work, but there are also a lot of ‘casual users’. These are users that aren’t on the internet for any particular task, but they are just browsing and killing time. The important thing to note is that these casual users have very different behavior from people who are online for a specific reason.
Another thing to note is that PCs are no longer where the bulk of your traffic is going to come from. Even if you are selling a high-ticket item such as real estate, you can be confident that the first encounter you have with a potential user will be through a mobile platform. Later, that user may revisit you through a desktop platform to gain a deeper understanding. One of the most important things you can do is to optimize your website for mobile as well as desktop.
Website Optimization
The reasons why people come online have changed and consequently, the way they behave online has also changed. Moreover, there is now a lot more competition on the internet. The website that caters most effectively to consumer needs will gather more traffic. This is also supported by the fact that search engines are constantly monitoring user behavior on different websites to get an understanding of the quality of the website. If a website has a higher bounce rate the search engine will understand that this particular website isn’t offering the best experience because users don’t spend a lot of time there. Naturally, this will have a negative impact on your SERP rankings.
What users need is a smooth user experience when they land on your page. The website should be easy to navigate, it should be quick to load, it should not be misleading, and it should have something that makes the users want to not only stay there but keep coming back. This can be broadly categorized as the user experience. It is more important than ever to have a user interface that is inviting and one that people want to visit again and again. Website optimization can be expensive and hard to do. This is why it is important to start off with the right platform and to have an expert helping you along the way because sometimes you can run into a problem that requires considerable changes to improve the user experience.
Internal Linking
Links are a big part of SEO in general and can be used very effectively to both help with SERP ranking and in improving user experience. Broadly speaking, there are two main kinds of links that you should be using. The first is known as a backlink. These are links on your website that link to other pages, or they can include links on other sites that bring visitors to your page. The best way to use backlinks on your site is to include them in blog posts and link to a relevant, high-authority website or page. For instance, if you are talking about SEO in a blog post, you could link to SEO regulations on a Google page.
The other kind of links you can use is known as internal links. As the name implies, these are links on your website, or blog post, that link to other parts of your website. For instance, if you are discussing how to buy a home in a blog post, you could add a link to another one of your blog posts that talks about how you can get financing to buy a home as a new homeowner.
Google, and other search engines, rely on crawlers to index information. When you add more links to your website, whether those are backlinks or internal links, it makes it easier for crawlers to find your website. When you are doing real estate SEO marketing, the more your website is connected to other bigger real estate sites, the easier it will be for a search engine to associate your website with that space. If a crawler detects that you are a real estate company but you are linking to a food blog, it won’t be seen as relevant and it will hurt your ranking.
Information Access
When visitors land on your real estate website, they typically have in mind something that they want. They might be there to learn about property prices in a specific area, they might want to see the kind of options available, they might want to consult with an expert or access any other real estate-related service. In most cases, they will want some kind of information. This could be in any form. One way to improve the user experience and the value of your website is to offer more than the user expects.
It can be quite time-consuming and also expensive to organically generate this information and publish it on your site. Luckily, there are a lot of plugins that you can install onto your website to increase its functionality. If there is a local MLS that you have access to, or if there is any other database that you have access to, add that to your website. Linking to third-party directories and other sources of valuable information is an excellent strategy for improving the domain authority of your own website and also enhancing the user experience.
User Intent
Within the real estate industry, there are various things that you can focus on. For instance, you might want to be an expert in residential property renovations or an expert in commercial property rentals. Within the customer pool that searches for real estate queries, there will be smaller, more specific groups that need a specific service or access to a professional with knowledge of a niche industry. This is something that will be reflected in their user intent when they search, and it is something you need to address through your content.
The more accurately you can meet the users’ intent, the better the user experience will be and the more positive signals search engines will get about your website. There are a lot of tools you can use for this task, but the goal is to understand the intent. This can broadly be categorized as keyword analysis. Once you have the keywords you want to target, you need to further refine the process and understand exactly which keywords you want to rank for so that you are addressing a specific user intent. Even if you want to target a large segment of the market, starting off with this very specific approach will help grow your site. Later on, you can expand to researching other kinds of keywords that target other user intents.
Directories
Real estate directories such as multiple listing services are extremely powerful resources. However, not every real estate business has the time to create one for themselves and it can be economically unviable to be a member of all MLS platforms. In just a single state there can be dozens of different MLS platforms. However, you can still harness the power of these services by creating links to them on your platform. A lot of MLS platforms allow this practice and many even have dedicated tools that you can install on your website that will give you a properly optimized link to the main directory. This is something that you can offer as a free service, or you could charge members for it.
In either case, it is going to help you tremendously in creating value for your website visitors and will also improve your SEO substantially. In particular, getting links to high-quality MLS platforms that already have an established position will be very useful. Even if this requires a small investment, it will be well worth your money and your time.
Similarly, you can also list your website on relevant directories and portals where people can find you. For instance, you can set up a Google My Business account to get your business listed on the Google Maps service. This will be a powerful solution that will help with local SEO. Just like how there are several job boards for job seekers, there are also a lot of public real estate portals where you can list your business as a service provider and people can find you through that avenue as well. Many of these portals and directories have millions of visitors per month, so you can expect to get a good amount of traffic from this effort.
Quality Content
The kind of content you create and the quality of the content you publish on your website play a huge role in SEO. One of the best things you can do for your real estate business is to hire expert content creators that will help publish content that provides value and drives engagement. A lot of businesses make the mistake of simply recreating content that already exists on the internet. Your visitors will notice this and so will the search engine and it will hurt your SEO efforts.
Moreover, while blogs and other written content are critical to SEO ranking through keywords, you also need to use pictures and videos. In the past few years, a lot of businesses have also started creating their own podcasts, because it is a form of content that people really enjoy and it helps engagement tremendously. If you want quicker results from your SEO efforts, consider trying out different kinds of content. If you are using written content, make sure it is properly optimized for SEO and is in line with your overall SEO strategy.
Internet usage has exploded in the past decade. In nearly every country around the world among all segments of the population, internet usage is higher than ever thanks to cheaper technology and easier access to the internet. While this means that SEO is more effective than ever before, it also means that the digital landscape is more competitive than it has ever been. It’s also important to note that the bulk of this traffic is present on social media platforms and not so much on general search queries. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others, are raking in hundreds of millions of views per day. If you want to give your SEO strategy a solid boost, then leverage the power of these networks. While ranking in search engine results is good, it’s also very effective to get direct traffic from social media. Just setting up a simple social media presence and creating some good content will be enough to get the ball rolling. If you feel like you want to take it to the next level, you can always invest in paid social media ads and get all the traffic you want.